Elizabeth glared at him. NTR? What the fuck? ‘I literally have no clue what you’re talking about,’ she said.

‘NTR,’ he repeated, putting his phone down on the desk and leaning back to stretch out, ensuring that his too-short T-shirt rose up above the waistband of his jeans, revealing a perfectly sculpted six-pack. She stared at it, willing herself to look away. ‘Negative Twitter Ratio. It’s a basic rule on social media. The number of your tweets should never exceed the number of your followers. If you’ve got, say, a hundred followers but have tweeted ten thousand times, then you’re just screaming into a void.’ He scrolled through the app. ‘Look at this guy, for example. Says he’s one half of a podcast. But he’s tweeted 120,000 times to about 5,000 followers. That’s a NTR of 24! You’d wonder how the poor guy still has a fingerprint on his thumb after so much tweeting. Someone needs to tell him that not every random thought that goes through his head needs to be immortalized for the sake of four likes. Don’t worry, Elizabeth, your account is nowhere near as embarrassing as that, but still, you have a NTR of 10.2. I, on the other hand, have around 430,000 followers, but I’ve only tweeted 7,000 times. That’s the way it should be. So I have a Positive Twitter Ratio of 62. Hashtag winning.’

‘Four hundred and thirty thousand followers?’ she asked, trying to keep the envy and disbelief out of her voice. ‘Who are you? What have you done?’

‘A bit of everything,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Some runway. Some commercial. Some magazine. A little reality. I did a stint on Hollyoaks when I was younger, but it wasn’t the place for me to develop, you know? It’s one thing to be on a soap but another to show up at the Soap Awards and act like it’s the Oscars. Plus, I’ve got some really great stuff in the pipeline, but I’m not at liberty to talk about that right now. Sorry.’

‘Of course you’re not,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘How convenient.’

‘I’ve also got some important followers.’

‘Really?’ she asked, intrigued now. ‘Who?’

‘Dermot O’Leary. Ed Sheeran. Mabel. Some of the writers at GQ and Esquire. Oh, and Haz, of course.’

‘Haz?

‘Harry.’

‘Harry who?’ she asked, her eyes opening wide. ‘Prince Harry?’

‘Christ, no. That would be mortifying. Harry Styles.’

‘What …?’ she asked, putting her hands on the sides of the chair to settle herself. He couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. ‘No … you can’t have …’

‘We’re, like, mates,’ said the boy, as if it was neither here nor there. ‘Honestly, I can’t talk about him, though, so please don’t ask. He really values his privacy and I respect that. He’s the same about me.’

She looked around the waiting area, hoping to see a water dispenser because she was beginning to feel dehydrated.

‘Harry Styles follows you,’ she said, more of a bewildered statement than a question.